Basement treasure gives insight into history of Ruggles House

Long-forgotten papers shed light on the history of Burlington's Ruggles House and the people who created and preserved it

Nov. 9, 2012

Richard Lang, a resident of Ruggles House, looks over some of the historical documents about the mansion that he found in the basement boiler room. They will be turned over to UVM's Special Collections. / MADDIE MCGARVEY/FREE PRESS

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Free Press Staff Writer

Ruggles House / Free Press file photo

A portrait of Lucy C. Ruggles, founder of Ruggles House.

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Richard Lang had been living in Ruggles House in Burlington a couple of years when he heard that some old papers had been found in the basement that were going to be thrown out because they were a fire hazard.

He went down to have a look. He had to hunt around a bit.

He’d never been in the old boiler room before, but when he opened the door, there they were, scattered about the gravelly floor in various states of decay: ledger books, correspondence and loose papers, some getting moldy in the damp air.

The papers pertained to Ruggles House — an elegant mansion nearly two centuries old that has come under the sway of different design styles, different owners — and perhaps were as historic as the house itself. Lang had no idea how long they’d been consigned to the boiler room, but he was sure of one thing: They didn’t belong in a landfill.

He hauled them up to his apartment and began looking through them. Sure enough, they extended back more than a century, and they even included a draft of the will that led to the house’s establishment as a retirement home.

“I have this curator approach,” Lang said the other day. “I used to live in a Victorian house, and I took the same approach to that, too. I could not let this go to the dump.”

Quite the contrary: At a ceremony on Nov. 16, the 80th anniversary of the founding of Ruggles House, Lang will turn over the trove to Special Collections, of the University of Vermont’s Bailey-Howe Library, which has pledged to restore and preserve it as part of its research archives.

Future researchers will be following in Lang’s wake. There were about 5,000 pages in that boiler-room collection. He has read and photographed every one.

Historic phases

Built in the 1820s in the Greek Revival style by Jesse Hollister, a veteran of Battle of Bunker Hill, the house at 262 S. Prospect St. passed through a series of owners and modifications over the next century, as recounted by David Blow in the second volume of “Historic Guide to Burlington Neighborhoods” (1997):

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The Rev. Marshall Shedd bought the house in 1835 and passed it on to his son, William, who became a professor of English at the University of Vermont and later, when he left UVM in 1852, sold the house to...

Chalon F. Davey, a UVM alumnus (1842) and lawyer who served as Burlington town clerk and, briefly, as UVM treasurer, who sold the property in 1856 for $4,500 to ...

George DeForest, a wealthy New Yorker who put on an Italian-villa-style addition to the front of the brick house and spent summers there. His widow sold the house in 1868 to ...

Mial Davis, a lumber magnate, who who built a four-story tower that included a north parlor and Victorian features in a style known as Eastlake. Davis’ business went bust in 1876, and two years later the house was purchased by ...

Horace Brookes, another wealthy New Yorker who summered in Burlington and who owned the place until 1927, when it was bought by ...

Carl F. Robinson, a doctor who received his M.D. from UVM in 1916 and was a cancer specialist who used X-rays and radium treatments. He operated a sanitarium in the house for three years, during which he subdivided some of the adjoining property for a development lining a new street named for him (Robinson Parkway). Then in 1930, the house was purchased for about $35,000 by ...

Charles H. Darling, one of two protagonists in the Ruggles House saga. He leased the place to UVM as a women’s dormitory for two years before he was able to get the building in shape to become the retirement home that the other key figure, Lucy S. Ruggles, had envisioned more than three decades before.

Fulfilling Lucy Ruggles' will

As Lang browsed through the papers, facets of their two personalities began to emerge.

“What I came to appreciate was the the two remarkable people who created Ruggles House,” he said recently.

“Lucy was a great humanist and she had a remarkable intellect,” he said. Born in Massachusetts in 1816, she taught in the South and moved back to New England in her later years, dying in Bennington in 1896. She never married, but she delighted in children and wrote a book, “New Poems for Children,” published in 1880. The book includes four dozen poems and a brief introduction in which she advises, “The poetic temperament in children should be encouraged and cherished, not chilled by indifference or annihilated by ridicule...”

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The opening poem, “The Spider,” portrays a rather sinister creature spreading an “airy tent upon the velvet grass” ...

“And there he sits and catches flies

Which venture oft too nigh —

The flies for him are dainty meat,

He loves to see them die.”

Ruggles was a thrifty woman who accumulated a small fortune — about $33,000 — which she resolved should be used to establish a retirement home for female teachers. An 11-page draft of her will, which she wrote out by hand in Boston in 1894, specifies that “this is not to be a charitable institution” but for “educated ladies” of limited means. The house she had in mind was to have, among other things, a library and sewing machines for common use.

Such a home would have filled an obvious need in those days, as teachers didn’t have pensions or Social Security to fall back on. Ruggles’ brand of humanism also had a streak of racism, however:

“Colored persons who may be or have been teachers are not to be admitted as inmates except as cooks, nurses or waiters,” she wrote.

Ruggles was aware that her financial assets were insufficient to see the project through.

“I have not the means to establish such a building as my head and heart suggest,” she wrote, “but what I have to give I hope will prove a nucleus to which other donations from persons of means may from time to time be added to furnish and improve the home...”

Ultimately, the extra money came from prudent investments of her own nest egg after she died.

After her death, in Bennington, young lawyer Charles H. Darling was named trustee of her estate, which he sucessfully defended her will against challenges from her relatives. Darling invested her assets in hopes they would grow large enough to fulfill her wishes, and sure enough — by 1930, the value was up to $122,000. Darling had moved to Burlington in the interim, and he purchased the house on South Prospect Street from Robinson for $35,375. Two years later, on Nov. 16, 1932, the house opened officially under the purview of the Ruggles Foundation, with a staff that included cook and chambermaid. Room and board cost $9 a week.

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Darling, who died in 1945, remained executor of the trust and continued to watch over the property. Some time in the mid-’30s he planted a hedge of barberry bushes to prevent UVM students from using the property as a short-cut to campus.

His steadfastness over a half century — and especially during the three decades after Ruggles’ death when he conscientiously managed the growing endowment — impresses Lang.

“He was a lawyer,” Lang said. “He could easily have done the minimum to fulfill Lucy’s will. Instead, he took it on as a personal challenge. It’s as though he had no other clients.”

The ledger books include the accounts maintained over many years. In 1942, the house’s matron earned a monthly salary of $83.33. The endowment was invested in stocks that included the Atchison, Topeka and Santa Fe Railroad and the Bellows Falls Hydroelectric Corp.

Over the years, trustees opened the house to retirees who hadn’t been teachers, and to men. (Lang, for example, used to work for IBM.). Trustees also dropped the ban on non-whites. The affordable room rates were maintained, but by the end of the century, the endowment was depleted and trustees faced the choice of closing the house or turning it over to someone who could keep it going.

The savior was Cathedral Square Corp., a nonprofit organization. Cathedral Square carried out a major renovation and added several living units. The house now has 15 apartments (one for a resident manager), each with its own kitchen and bathroom. Today, Ruggles House is one of 24 “housing communities” operated by Cathedral Square that offers older people a chance to live independently.

To the extent that the house offers affordable accommodations to retired people of moderate means, Lucy Ruggles’ intent is still being fulfilled. One of her preferences abandoned long ago, however.

“I have suggested Saratoga Springs in the state of New York as the best location for this institution,” she wrote in her will, “but it is not essential that the location should be there.”